‘Manif pour tous’ fails to defeat EU gay rights report

‘Manif pour tous’, the French movement formed in opposition to France’s legalisation of gay marriage last year, failed today to defeat a European Parliament report calling for discrimination protection to be extended to sexual orientation.

The movement had conducted a high-profile campaign against the report and cooperated with other groups across Europe to deliver a petition with 200,000 signatures to MEPs.

It was the first major pan-European effort by the movement since Frigide Barjot, a former leader of the group, announced in Strasbourg in March last year that she wished to expand the movement’s activities to a pan-European level. Th group held demonstrations against the report in Paris, Lyon, Warsaw, Budapest, Madrid and Brussels over the weekend with signs that read “Brussels, leave our kids alone”.

The non-binding ‘EU roadmap against homophobia and discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity’, prepared by Austrian Green MEP Ulrike Lunacek, was passed with 394 votes in favour and 196 against. It calls on the European Commission to adopt a roadmap or a strategy on combating discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Such strategies already exist in the field of Roma integration, discrimination on the basis of disability and gender equality.

The petition circulated by the manif pour tous wrote that “if adopted, the Lunacek report will give EU institutions and Member States no choice but to incorporate the homosexual agenda into public policy making.”

The petition also drew comparisons to a report on sexual and reproductive rights by centre-left Portuguese MEP Edite Estrela, which was defeated in December.

“Some argued that this would give special privileges to LGBT people,” said Lunacek after the vote. “But holding a partner’s hand without fear of being beaten up is no privilege—it’s a human right.” She said MEPs have been inundated with emails telling them to vote against the report, and she has personally received 41,000 such emails in just a few weeks.

The issue split the centre-right EPP group, many of whom supported the report. Roberta Metsola, a Maltese MEP who led the EPP’s work on the report, urged her colleagues to support it. “The text strikes the right balance and fully respects the principle of subsidiarty. I am proud to have supported it,” she said after the vote.

Many members of the ECR group, which is dominated by the British Conservative party, voted against the report.